Article: Making of Shells Necklace
How it started
I’ve always had a jar of shells on my desk & in my bathroom, moving with me from place to place over the years. My Mom collected them long ago and gave them to me. Little treasures.
They’ve always inspired me. When I look at them, they bring me calm, space, a quiet connection to nature, away from work, from myself, from my own obsessions.
I wanted to make something that reflected that feeling.
I have a friend who is a talented stone cutter and we began a small project carving shells by hand.
Choosing rough stones is part intuition, part experience.
Hidden beneath a crust, you never quite know what you'll find until they're cut. Sometimes the crust shows flashes of colour that hint at what's inside.
I still find it exciting every time. Especially when a beautiful piece of natural turquoise or lilac-blue chalcedony appears.
As we went along with the project, it became clear they were too expensive to produce as a full jewellery collection, but I needed to see it through. The result is little moving sculptures for the neck. We made earrings too. They’re really beautiful.
You can find carvings like this mass-produced elsewhere, cheaper, faster, but they carry no life, no love. These are different.
Each piece evolves slowly in the hands of a skilled artisan.
What starts as rough stone gradually takes shape, revealing its character and details along the way.
Every gemstone requires individual attention. Each one behaves differently, and there is always the possibility that a hidden natural crack will appear. It's a process that demands patience, precision and an enormous amount of skill.
The stones are beautiful, but it's the family and craftspeople behind the workshop who make the magic happen.
They source gemstones from around the world and transform them with an extraordinary level of skill and precision.
It's their craftsmanship that allows designers to bring ideas to life.
There’s a real journey here: stone to hand to sculpture. I travelled to Greece to choose the stone and sit with the artist. We made moulds, then finished each piece by hand.
Set with diamonds for a touch of light and suspended on an open gold chain, these imperfect-but-perfect carvings in mother of pearl and quartz are meant to bring a sense of space, calm, and grounded energy to the wearer.
Shells
